Opening a Remote Shell to Containers

Overview

The oc rsh command allows you to locally access and manage tools that are on
the system. The secure shell (SSH) is the underlying technology and industry
standard that provides a secure connection to the application. Access to
applications with the shell environment is protected and restricted with
Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux) policies.

Start a Secure Shell Session

Open a remote shell session to a container:

$ oc rsh <pod>

While in the remote shell, you can issue commands as if you are inside the
container and perform local operations like monitoring, debugging, and using CLI
commands specific to what is running in the container.

For example, in a MySQL container, you can count the number of records in the
database by invoking the mysql
command, then using the the prompt to type in the SELECT command. You can
also use use commands like ps(1) and ls(1) for validation.

BuildConfigs and DeployConfigs map out how you want things to look and
pods (with containers inside) are created and dismantled as needed. Your changes
are not persistent. If you make changes directly within the container and that
container is destroyed and rebuilt, your changes will no longer exist.

oc exec can be used to
execute a command remotely. However, the oc rsh command provides an easier way
to keep a remote shell open persistently.